latest ovals the name and style of Nero, the present building was still comparatively new when, in A.D. 379, the ancient religion was abolished by the edict of Theodosius. It was then the most gorgeous as well as the most recent of all those larger temples built during the prosperous foreign rule of the last seven hundred years. It stood, surrounded by groves of palm and acacia, within the precincts of a vast inclosure, the walls of which, one thousand feet in length, thirty-five feet in height and fifteen feet thick, are still traceable. A dromos, now buried under twenty feet of débris, led from the pylon to the portico. The pylon is there still, a partial ruin; but the temple, with its roof, its staircases and its secret treasure-crypts, is in all essential respects as perfect as on the day when its splendor was given over to the spoilers. One can easily imagine how these spoilers sacked and ravaged all before them; how they desecrated the sacred places and cast down the statues of the goddess and divided the treasures of the sanctuary. They did not, it is true, commit such wholesale destruction as the Persian invaders of nine hundred years before; but they were merciless iconoclasts and hacked away the face of every figure within easy reach, both inside and outside the building. Among those which escaped, however, is the famous external bas-relief of Cleopatra on the back of the temple. This curious sculpture is now banked up with rubbish for its better preservation and can no longer be seen by travelers. It was, however, admirably photographed some years ago by Signor Beati; which photograph is faithfully reproduced in the annexed engraving. Cleopatra is here represented with a head-dress combining the attributes of three goddesses; namely, the vulture of Maut (the head of which is modeled in a masterly way), the horned disk of Hathor and the throne of Isis. The falling mass below the head-dress is intended to represent hair dressed according to the Egyptian fashion, in an infinite number of small plaits, each finished off with an ornamental tag. The women of Egypt and Nubia wear their hair so to this day and unplait it, I am sorry to say, not oftener than once in every eight or ten weeks. The Nubian girls fasten each separate tail with a lump of Nile mud daubed over with yellow ocher; but Queen Cleopatra’s silken tresses were probably tipped with gilded wax or gum.